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Interestingly enough (to me, at least), I happen to be reading a Korean paper on the ubiquitous computing / wireless networks right now.

What I find interesting is that the concept has received government support and direction as part of a push to develop the "U-Society" (which I suppose is mean to be an abbreviation for "ubiquitous computing society"). In Korea, this is governmental industrial policy with the goal of making Korean industry a leader in producing "ubiquitously networked" products of all kinds. On the other hand, here in the United States, it seems like more of an matter of academic study and, perhaps, seen as a possible cost-saving (as opposed to profit-producing) technology.

Oh well, I guess FedEx and UPS don't mind buying all of their IP-enabled supplies from LG & Samsung if it saves them a few pennies.

What I find interesting is that the concept has received government support and direction as part of a push to develop the "U-Society" (which I suppose is mean to be an abbreviation for "ubiquitous computing society"). In Korea, this is governmental industrial policy with the goal of making Korean industry a leader in producing "ubiquitously networked" products of all kinds. On the other hand, here in the United States, it seems like more of an matter of academic study and, perhaps, seen as a possible cost-saving (as opposed to profit-producing) technology.

And what's wrong with the US approach? I see yet again the belief that dumping public funds on R&D in an area means getting concrete, valuable results in an area.

If all you do is dump public funds into the piggy trough then you won't get much back out. But that's not the only way to do it. Studying the economic history of South Korea is quite interesting. In the early 60s, Korea was porer than most sub-Saharan African countries with a GDP per capita of under $100. But then the government began to implement an industrial policy aimed at developing certain chosen key industries such as steel production, shipbuilding and automobile manufacturing.
Some of the companies directed by the government to initiate these industrial projects financed through government grants, externally sourced financial aid, and foreign loans were little businesses named Hyundai and Samsung. Perhaps you've heard of them. Other companies were created out of nothing to pursue this industrial strategy, such as Posco, producer of about 35 million tons of high quality steel annually.
South Korea went from being one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the wealthiest, in about 30 years. I know educated, well off Koreans who are less than 40 years old, who, as children, lived in straw-roofed huts and whose parents and grandparents slung poo in a rice paddy to survive. I'd call that concrete, valuable results.

That system of development is well known and has brought a lot of countries out of poverty. But it has yet to get a country ahead of the pack. While we don't have a lot of examples, it's worth noting that this strategy is now holding Japan back currently. The structures that enabled them to catch up quickly, such as putting a huge portion of their citizens' savings into government backed development projects, are now dysfunctional (building a lot of concrete buildings and bridges to nowhere, for example, an

What does Xerox Parc (company funded), the european autodidact scientific pioneers of old (self funded or funded by weathy patrons) and NASA (government funded) have in common? They are environments that let smart people "play" with few constraints. If you're looking for advancement that's how you get it.

What does Xerox Parc (company funded), the european autodidact scientific pioneers of old (self funded or funded by weathy patrons) and NASA (government funded) have in common? They are environments that let smart people "play" with few constraints.

And it's interesting that none of those environments have that now, much less have it in common. And NASA, the only government agency on that list, never really did have that environment.

Regarding NASA - I doubt that very much. Yes, bureaucracy develops when the creativity that spawns a project leaves and things go into "holding mode" eg. I read what Richard Feynmann had to say Re: his involvement in the whole O-ring fiasco. Creativity CANNOT exist in a bureaucracy unless it's finding ways of getting around the bureaucracy. NASAs early days achieved an awful lot though. I haven't read anything by someone who was at NASA during those days, but I did read Richard Feynmann's experience on

What I find interesting is that the concept has received government support and direction as part of a push to develop the "U-Society" (which I suppose is mean to be an abbreviation for "ubiquitous computing society"). In Korea, this is governmental industrial policy with the goal of making Korean industry a leader in producing "ubiquitously networked" products of all kinds. On the other hand, here in the United States,

The United States is a bit bi-polar when it comes to government direction of industry.On the one hand, businesses want the government to set goals and priorities,as it allows them to all pull in the same direction, with the knowledge that government funds will also be along for the ride.

On the one hand, we have a vocal group of people that want no government involvement in anything business related.

The end result is a fractured public policy that prevents us from having a coherent national plan for where th

According to FedEx CIO Rob Carter, that need to analyze events in real time has resulted in an effort to âoeradicallyâ decompose monolithic vertical applications into sets of core granular services, which the company will then mash into any number of analytics applications. The ultimate goal: a matrix of IT services that functions with the speed and flexibility of a brain, freeing FedEx from a system dependent on files strewn across any number of databases kept on disk storage systems too slow to support advanced, real-time analytic applications.

Dear God, I think this man just achieved the Buzzword Singularity. If we can harness this power...

"For example, when waking up a on a summer day, wouldn't it be nice to have an app that tells you what beach is sunniest?"

What about that requires the "Internet of Things"? If you wanted to implement that right now, you'd fetch the National Weather Service's XML structured weather data [weather.gov] for the points of interest. Given a latitude and longitude, the NWS server will compute their weather model for any desired point in the US on request. For beaches, there are already sites with current surf reports, and the major surf spots have webcams.

There are applications for low-powered devices that talk IPv6, but this isn't one of the